Czar Kristoff: New Refuge

‘New Refuge’ was first released as a single edition publication as a work included in Czar Kristoff’s solo exhibition with the same title where the artist archived testing papers he gathered from a local school and office supply store. These papers contained scribbles, names of people, a few gibberish here and there. They held traces of identity—imprints of people’s existences left hastily. The artist examined these imprints by continuously enlarging them, magnifying and focusing on the minute details for a more intimate view of the traces of self that were left behind. This examination resulted to New Refuge being a simulation of a new correspondence between two people—between the viewer and the one who has left the markings.

The original single edition was produced entirely using a photocopier and for this edition, we wanted to replicate the way it was made by directly ‘photocopying’ the original using the Risograph to produce 200 ‘copies’. The only differences here are the new covers and a smaller (cropped, not resized) format. Also, every book has a different/random page sequence; each book can therefore still be considered a private correspondence—as it was intended in the original work.